On and On
by shippershape
Summary: One-Shot following the season 1 finale. Basically, Fitz is in a coma and Jemma has done everything she can. This is her struggling to come to terms with what happened, and simultaneously trying not to give up hope and to accept what she has lost. Fitzsimmons all the way. Please review, they are the sustenance on which I survive.


It was quiet. There had been things that were different, things that had reopened the wound in Jemma's heart as she sat next to Fitz's bed. There was always something to remind her that half of her was broken, laying comatose in a hyperbaric chamber. She never really got away from it, and every small thing in the day was harder. But the quiet was unbearable. She was used to the steady static of babble from Fitz, the words that would have been nonsense to anyone else. It seemed like most of the time her mind was empty, the silence echoing dully, waiting for Fitz to fill it.

She remembered the way her breath had left her before he pushed the button that let 7 tonnes of atmospheric pressure into the hatch, flooding them. She remembered forcing her eyes open, fighting the sting of the salt water as her hand closed around the material of Fitz's sweater. It hadn't actually occurred to her to leave him. She knew he would have told her to leave him if he'd been able, but it would have been like leaving half of herself behind.

She remembered the roar of the ocean collapsing in on them mingling with her scream as she watched Fitz crushed breathless, the peace in his eyes breaking everything inside her. She hadn't wanted that kind of love. She hadn't wanted him to ask her to live without him. She looked down at him now, his eyes closed, chest rising rhythmically with the thrum of the machine. She didn't want this now, a life where she had to keep going alone, where her best friend was somewhere she couldn't touch him. She didn't know what she wished, would she really have drowned with him instead of living alone? She could practically hear his anger, as if he were in her head.

_Jemma, you have to finish what we started. You can't throw your life away, there's too much left for you to do. You're worth too much to be that selfish._ She could picture his smile, soft and playful. A little shy. _You were amazing before you ever met me. You'll find your way, you always do._

But she didn't want to. She wanted to sit beside him, to watch his chest rise and fall and take comfort in that small sign of life. The proof that he was still here, even in the smallest of ways. Jemma didn't really believe he was gone. She couldn't. The world without Fitz was too vast and too frightening, and she was starting to think she might never leave this room.

"I won't leave you, Fitz." His face as their world exploded into water flashed into her mind and she let out a cry that was heartbreak and unspeakable pain and something a little bit darker than hopelessness. Someone had once told her it got easier with time. She was beginning to suspect that might have been a lie. "If you really loved me," she whispered, even though no one else was in the room. "You would come back to me. You wouldn't make me spend the rest of my life missing you. Not if you loved me." She hadn't realized she was crying again. But her hands were wet, and when she raised them to her cheeks those were wet too. She hadn't cried much, and the others had been on eggshells around her, waiting for her to crack.

Her grief wasn't quite like that. It wasn't loud and obvious, it wasn't tears and bargaining and anger. It was a quiet thing inside her that seemed to expand into the silence of his absence, negative space that was cold and dark and nothing. Sometimes she thought maybe she was gone too, maybe she was a ghost, and sometimes that didn't seem so bad. But now she watched him, and she missed him, and she thought that the pain she was feeling was too cruel to be anything other than human.

She had spent weeks trying to help him, wracking her large and capable mind. She had tried standard things, and experimental things, and had eventually begged Coulson to let her try alien things. But even if he would have allowed it, the lab was gone and so were all the supplies, so she was on her own and Fitz would die a human death while she watched and resisted the urge to lay down beside him and close her eyes and never open them again.

"You thought letting me live was saving me, but you were wrong." She leaned down, her nose nearly pressed against the glass. "This isn't better, Fitz. This isn't living." She sat back in her chair, waiting for the ache in her chest to fade back into numbness, and closed her eyes.

She would keep trying, because it was what he would have wanted, and she wasn't selfish enough to make his sacrifice a wasted one. But grief replaced Leo in her life, and it would be her constant companion, and if by some miracle he ever woke up she was beginning to think she might never forgive him for what he'd done.

"It's not better." She murmured the words before the exhaustion pain wrought settled over her, and she finally found a place where she didn't have to be half of herself anymore. It would hurt like hell when she woke up, but she was beginning to be used to that.


End file.
